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Marc Chagall: The Bible

Marc Chagall (Russian / French, 1887–1985)

DRAWINGS FROM THE BIBLE

"I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it …. It has always seemed to me … the greatest source of poetry of all time." -Marc Chagall.

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussia, in 1887 to a poor Hasidic family. The eldest of nine children, Chagall studied first in a heder before moving to a secular Russian school where he began to display his artistic talent. From 1910 to 1914, he lived in Paris, and there absorbed the works of the leading cubist, surrealist, and fauvist painters. In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Marc Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images and personages. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. The Bolshevik authorities, however, frowned upon Chagall's style of art as too modern, and in 1922, Marc Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later.

In the early 1930s the economic and political crisis that beset Europe also had its effect upon Chagall. Nazi persecution of the Jews made the artist more aware of his own Jewish roots and caused him to long for a more serious type of artistic expression of deeper significance to the human condition. Drawings for the Bible provided just such an outlet. It was commissioned in 1930 by Ambroise Vollard, a Parisian art dealer and publisher of deluxe art books. Chagall used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Palestine to experience for himself the people, the landscape and the sacred, historic places. Although familiar with the works of the old masters, his depictions are independent of much of the usual iconography and traditional conventions. Rather, Chagall based his designs on his personal memories and his impressions from his trip to Palestine. By 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, he had finished 66 images. However Vollard died that same year and when the series was finally completed in 1956, it was published at long last by Edition Tériade in Paris and Harcourt, Brace and Company in New York.

Chagall was already a famous painter when he took up lithography. He proved a natural to the medium and used his mastery of color and expression to portray a variety of narratives with his signature dreamlike distillation of form. This fusion of fantasy, religion, and nostalgia in The Bible reflects both Chagall’s awe and respect for the passages, as well as the joy he took from the tradition of storytelling.

Marc Chagall: The Bible

Twenty-four color lithographs by Marc Chagall based on Biblical themes, published in a double issue of the influential art journal Verve.